Assessing the deepwater horizon oil spill with the sentry autonomous underwater vehicle

Abstract

This paper reports the Sentry autonomous underwater vehicle and its deployment on two cruises in response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The first cruise, in June 2010, coupled Sentry with the TETHYS mass spectrometer to track and localize a subsea hydrocarbon plume at a depth of approximately 1100m going at least 30km from the oil spill site. In December 2010, Sentry mapped and photographed deep-sea biological communities for follow-up observations and sampling with the Alvin manned submersible. These cruises demonstrate how robots and novel sensing technologies contributed to the oil spill assessment and the broader impact of technologies developed for basic research.

Mid-water current aided localization for autonomous underwater vehicles

“…Sentry is a 6000m rated AUV designed and built by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) for geophysical, geochemical, and biological surveys and is operated by WHOI for the U.S. scientific community (Kinsey et al (2011)). The ADCP sensor is a 300 kHz RDI Navigator with 120m maximum range with default settings, although with reduced accuracy compared to the 1200 kHz sensor on the Sirius AUV.…”

Field performance evaluation of new methods for in-situ calibration of attitude and doppler sensors for underwater vehicle navigation

“…In [16], the authors report a formulation of this approach based on the use of rotors in Geometric Algebra. [4], [6], [12], [21]. Image Credit: Dr. Christopher German, WHOI.…”

“…In this paper we report the results of a comparative experimental analysis of the performance of five previously reported calibration methods with navigation data from oceanographic survey missions of the Sentry autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) [12], shown in Figure 1, conducted in March, 2011 in the Kermadec Arc in the Southern Pacific Ocean. The results reveal consistent differences in performance of the various methods when analyzed on navigation data from several different vehicle dives.…”

Toward automatic classification of chemical sensor data from autonomous underwater vehicles

“…The CTD data identified a deep subsurface plume tending to the WSW of the Deepwater Horizon site and centered at a depth of 1100 m [21]. The AUV provided a complementary horizontal perspective [6]. Together, the CTD and Sentry resulted in a detailed, multimodal picture of a coherent subsurface plume extending at least 35 km from the Deepwater Horizon site.…”

“…These advantages will be compounded by enhancements in autonomy. Scientific understanding of oceanographic processes including fronts [2], thermoclines [2], [3], algal blooms [4], [5], and deep-sea plumes [6], [7] have all been improved using AUV-based adaptive sampling. Data-adaptive sampling could conceivably accelerate the study of any oceanographic phenomenon spatially confined and/or temporally transient at scales accessible to a given AUV platform.…”